Michael Cohen has been cooperating with the probe into Donald Trump’s Russia scandal
All along, the endgame question in Donald Trump’s Russia scandal has been which of his advisers and associates would flip on him in order to avoid going to prison themselves. That’s why it raised eyebrows when Trump’s longtime personal and business attorney Michael Cohen hired an attorney of his own this summer. And as of today we now know that Cohen has in fact been working with Trump-Russia investigators.
In the past sixteen hours, three bombshells have been published by major newspapers exposing that Donald Trump was trying to build a Trump Tower in Moscow during the election. The third of the three just arrived this afternoon and reveals that Michael Cohen sent an email during the election to Vladimir Putin’s personal spokesman, asking for help in getting the real estate project built (link). This is an explosive revelation because it’s impossible to imagine that Cohen would have done this without Trump’s approval, which means that Trump was in fact asking Putin for help during the election. But the devil is in the details.
The WaPo story reveals that Cohen has admitted to his role in this Trump Tower Moscow plot to Congressional investigators. Cohen seems to be trying to pin the idea on convicted Russian mafia figure Felix Sater, while insisting that his role was an innocent one. But the point is that Cohen is indeed giving key details to investigators, presumably in an effect to get himself off the hook. And this is crucial, because it’s often how investigations are broken wide open.
Paul Manafort told investigators about the meeting he attended between Donald Trump Jr and a Russian attorney, in a similar attempt at getting himself off the hook. That ended up snowballing, as investigators and the media were subsequently able to determine that the Russian attorney was representing the Kremlin, and that dirt on Hillary Clinton was offered. Similarly, with Michael Cohen now giving up key details about the Trump Tower Moscow story to investigators, it’s likely to lead them and the media to piecing together the darker underlying story. Cohen may have just given up Trump whether he intended to or not.
